Susanna Clarke's Magic Book

By JOHN HODGMAN

Published: August 1, 2004

wanted to write about magicians,'' Susanna Clarke said as we climbed a high moor in Derbyshire. ''I really like magicians,'' she went on, with a wry, apologetic dignity, as if it were an affliction she was born with. ''But there was no reason to suppose anyone else would.''

It was a cool, gray evening, and Clarke's luminous silver hair was still damp from a sudden rain that had come and passed. Her partner, the science-fiction and fantasy novelist and critic Colin Greenland, had gotten far ahead of us. They have been vacationing here for six years, hiking these steep hills and wooded cloughs in the very south of the north of England. They are both beer enthusiasts and punctuate their ramblings with long digressions in local pubs. Normally they live together in Cambridge, where Clarke worked as a cookbook editor for many years. But now she wore the comfortable clothes and comfortable air of someone who has left her day job forever. Because after 10 years, she has finally finished her novel, ''Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,'' and it will be published this September.

It follows the friendship of two gentleman sorcerers in London in the early 19th century: the bookish Mr. Norrell and his pupil, the dilettante Jonathan Strange, who come to the aid of England in the Napoleonic Wars by, for example, moving Brussels to America. And it is about a third magician, the Raven King, a human brought up by fairies who came to rule Northern England through much of the Middle Ages before suddenly disappearing, taking magic away from England and closing the fairy roads behind him.

The novel is being compared with abandon in the press to the ''Harry Potter'' books, but it is not for children, unless they are children who really, really love footnotes. It is nearly 800 pages long, but in some ways that number feels arbitrary, as if the novel consisted of just those pages Clarke chose to show, and that she might have easily chosen another 800 from those she kept in reserve. She has lived in the world of the novel for more than a decade after all, carefully charting the false history of English magic and documenting it with citations from a fastidiously false bibliography. What did not make it into the main story is alluded to in copious notes that make up sort of a second novel at the bottom of its pages (when they do not take over the pages altogether).

Clarke is equally meticulous in the research she has not made up, which has produced an observant and often very funny comment on the stiff mores of regency England: when Mr. Norrell comes to restore magic to England and becomes a reluctant celebrity, it is not so much that London is enthralled with magic as it is enthralled with the same old spells -- the lure of notoriety, the cultivation of social status.

In short, it is a patient, grown-up novel of dueling wizards. As much as this spells crowd-pleaser to me, I would have considered this something for a niche crowd. But Bloomsbury is betting I am wrong, publishing some 250,000 hardcover copies simultaneously in the United States, Britain and Germany, with 17 foreign publishers currently finishing their translations.

''What happened when I was writing 'Strange & Norrell,''' Clarke said on the moor, ''was the world kind of changed in my favor.''

When Clarke's first story was published, she almost didn't know about it. In 1993, she had just turned 33 and had returned to England after a stint teaching English in Italy and Spain with a mind to write a novel about magicians. And being a serious, responsible person, she signed up for a five-day residential course in writing fantasy and science fiction. The co-instructor, Colin Greenland, was a renowned critic and champion of the genre who had long argued that it be taken seriously as literature, which Clarke appreciated. She also liked that in his novel ''Harm's Way,'' he had written about satellites made of wrought iron and so might have a feel for what she was doing.

But he wanted all the students to submit short stories before the course began, ''which annoyed me,'' she said when they picked me up at the train station, apparently unconcerned about offending Greenland. ''I wasn't working on short stories. I was working on a novel.''

At the time, she wrote, and still does, in fragments: bits of dialogue and sketches of scenes that come to her as if they were overheard. (Sometimes she will be sitting in a pub and start scribbling in notebooks as Greenland waits.) Even by then she had amassed ''great bundles'' of material.

But being diligent, she didn't complain. So she culled from the bundles something resembling a short story, and she called it ''The Ladies of Grace Adieu.'' It was about three otherwise respectable women who secretly practiced magic -- including the governess, Miss Tobias, who was ''too tall, too fond of books, too grave and -- a curious thing -- never smiled unless there was some thing to smile at'' -- and are discovered by the famous magician of London Jonathan Strange.